The open-source project OwnCloud is a great alternative to
Dropbox, Box, or other file-sharing and
syncing sites if you need to keep control of your data
in-house. I've been managing a few installs of it since
version 4, and while the online management tools have come a long
way, there are still a few things that need to be done from the
command line.

Here's a PowerShell script I came up with to trigger a rescan of
a user's files when needed (if I've had to clean out files or
restore them from a backup). Hope someone finds this
useful.

Sometimes I just need to jot myself some notes so I don't forget
them. In this case, this
page on MacWindows.com has helped me greatly in the past (and
will again in the very near future), and it may help others who
find odd SMB access errors, slowness, or other problems (especially
on older Mac OSs).

In this newer case, I think the problem is crappy firmware for
the
WD Sharespace... Need to convince the owner that a Synology or QNap
or Drobo would be a far better
thing to trust their business data to. At least they have
backups...

It looks like Acer has a quiet winner with
the Acer Iconia W700, plopping in Core i series chips (instead
of Atoms) and 4GB of ram. However, it seems to have
a number of drawbacks that make it a nice lightweight laptop
but not a great tablet. The
Iconia W510 seems to be a better choice for tablet-y uses.

I recently came across a few issues configuring Network Load
Balancing (NLB) on two Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V VMs running IIS and
MySql as a hosting solution for 100+ medium traffic WordPress sites
to be migrated over after testing.

Installation
and configuration of NLB went fine, and the cluster was
initially configured as multicast. This worked fine, until I
went to go test connectivity from the outside world - no
respone. Turns out, the gateway on this network was
(correctly) set to not relay multicast packets.
Unfortunately, creating static routes on this gateway was not
an option, so it was going to have to be unicast. Not a
problem - I shut the machines down, added another virtual ethernet
adapter, and reconfigured NLB to use the dedicated second
adapter. Windows 2008 R2 and 2012 Hyper-V hosts are now set
to block VM MAC address spoofing by default, so that needed to be
enabled for that second adapter.

All's well and good - WordPress sets up, everything works...
until I log into WordPress and find that it can't retrieve any
external info (themes, plugins, WordPress news, etc.) Because
of the way NLB works in unicast mode, each site was trying to use
the adapter it was bound to (the dedicated NLB adapter), which
because of the spoofed identical MAC addresses, couldn't guarantee
that the response would come back to the machine that generated
it.

...in addition to going into Advanced Settings from the Network
Connections list and setting the Management adapter as a higher
priority than the NLB adapter.

The first two commands reenable weak binding, while the third
command allows outgoing traffic to go out over the non-load
balanced adapter, based upon the order of the connections (and
guaranteeing it would come back to that specific machine).

Upon further testing, this solution did not work for the
given scenario. NLB is an outdated solution with
flaws, but for a while it was the only game in town (on the cheap
end). As stated in the setup docs, NLB creates a massive
amount of multicast data in this mode. The network
configuration is unfortunately large and flat, and this
configuration generated multicast storms of each and every request.
On an isolated VLAN, this could work, but at that point, you
might as well have gone in another direction. Also, upload
speeds are hobbled because of how much traffic is created with
incoming packets.

Dedicated load
balancers and proxy servers are much better for keeping large
amounts of web data highly available.
Physical devices are expensive but well-designed. Even a
lightweight software solution
like Squid on quality hardware would fit the bill, plus you get
the added benefit of offloading caching and compression to the
proxy server, but you lose the ease
of a single-point SSL configuration that the better featured
physical devices include and instead have to pass encrypted traffic
straight-through. Luckily,
IIS >= 8 has that covered.

Normally when preparing a Windows 7 base image, I'll install it
normally, update everything, remove temporary files, and then enter
audit mode to take care of a few final steps. For this
particular image, I decided to do everything from audit mode.

Normally after installing Service Pack 1, I remove the temporary
files by running

dism /online /Cleanup-Image /spsuperseded

However, DISM quit out with

Error: 1084
This service cannot be started in Safe Mode

After checking the logs, DISM is failing while trying to create
a system restore point, which does not run in audit mode.

The solution? Go into Windows System Settings -> System
Protection -> Protection Settings -> Configure, and turn off
System Restore. Once that's done, re-run the DISM command and
it should complete normally. After that, re-enable System
Restore and continue on.

After installing Adobe Acrobat XI to an image in audit mode,
after finishing the sysprep process and installing it onto a new
PC, Acrobat will not run. It gives an error stating that the
user should uninstall and reinstall, or talk to their systems
administrator.

Turns out, it's because the permissions aren't being properly
set on the ProgramData folder that Acrobat writes to when it tries
to present the end user with the license agreement and registration
form.

All that's needed is to take ownership of the directory, and
then to grant the Users group modify permissions on
C:\ProgramData\Adobe, either through the GUI or by running